New Delhi: Pakistan has come in for flak by several rights group for its "institutionalised violation of basic rights" at the Human Rights Commission session organised by the United Nations in Geneva.

"The Government of Pakistan professes to champion the rights of self-determination for the people of Kashmir. What it actually seeks to do is to exploit the sentiments of the Kashmiri people and mislead the international community," Mumtaz Khan said during his intervention during the conference on behalf of European Union of Public Relations.

He said that Pakistan was a country, which practised institutionalised violation of the basic rights of the people under its control including the right to freedom of expression and freedom to elect their own representative.

"It is revealing that a country, which preaches the holding of plebiscites to others, does not even permit the holding of free and fair elections when it comes to territories forcibly occupied by it," Khan said while speaking at the 60th session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Speaking on a separate subject on "Violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms in any part of the world", Khan Arshad Mehmood of World Peace Council NGO, said, "Most independent analysts acknowledge that Pakistan remains a dangerously unstable country, largely due to the military's domination of the political landscape, with all its adverse consequences to the civil and political, economic, social and cultural rights of the country's people."

Mehmood said that power of radical Islamists in Pakistan has grown from "strength-to-strength in the last three decades and have more importantly become the "sub-contractors for the Pakistani military's national security agendas in Afghanistan and Kashmir."

In an intervention during the debate on the same issue, Tahir Naseem Manhas of Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation NGO said that there were several States such as "Pakistan which have, for the past several decades, consciously armed, trained and financed violent, religious-extremist groups that have no compunction in maiming and killing innocent civilians and destroying their property."

Commenting on the recent peace moves by India and Pakistan, Manhas said, "These gains can be quickly squandered if Pakistan does not display the stamina to stay the course of reconciliation and dialogue."

Mumtaz Khan said that the UN Commission should urgently examine the human rights situation in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan.